ANA

Autonomic Network Architecture

This Integrated Project aims at exploring novel ways of organizing and using networks beyond legacy Internet technology. The ultimate goal is to design and develop a novel network architecture that enables flexible, dynamic, and fully autonomic formation of network nodes as well as whole networks. It will allow dynamic adaptation and re-organisation of the network according to the working, economical and social needs of the users. This is expected to be especially challenging in a mobile context where new resources become available dynamically, administrative domains change frequently, and the economic models may vary.

The scientific objective of this proposal is to identify fundamental autonomic network principles. Moreover, this project will build, demonstrate, and test such an autonomic network architecture. The key attribute is that such a network scales in a functional way that is, the network can extend both horizontally (more functionality) as well as vertically (different ways of integrating abundant functionality). The challenge addressed in this project is to come up with a network architecture and to fill it with the functionality needed to demonstrate the feasibility of autonomic networking.